YA author teams with The Script for Spotify deal

The band in Jamie Scallion's YA novel, The Rock'n'Roll Diaries: Making It, will "release" a series of songs on Spotify this week, after the author teamed up with rock group The Script.

Scallion, a musician, has self-published the book through Mad Notes Media, a venture he set up with The Script musicians Mark Sheehan and Danny O'Donoghue, and said the idea for the music arose when they were all on tour together.

"I was on tour with The Script and I mentioned that I'd written a book about a rock'n'roll band. They read it and we said wouldn't it be great if we put some music to it," he told The Bookseller. "Spotify suggested giving the band [known as the The RockAteers] a biography as if they were a real group, so people will come to the music not realising there is a book attached."

Scallion first released the book digitally in August and let readers download it in sections, for free, from the website www.therocknrolldiaries.com. Readers can also engage with content via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Meanwhile the Spotify songs will go live on Friday (29th November).

Scallion said the big engagement with social media was a deliberate ploy to try and attract teenage boys to the book. "I was shocked on the stats about how many boys are reading books," he said, adding: "If teenage boys aren't reading, where are our future novelists and lyricists going to come from? We get a lot of engagement from girls, and that's fantastic, but we also need to engage the boys."

Readers have the option of downloading The Rock'n'Roll Diaries: Making It and so far it has been downloaded 15,000 times

However, 80% of visitors opted for PDF, said Scallion, hinting that teenage boys may not be as switched on to e-readers as other groups of the population.

"Boys don't have credit cards and maybe they don't have e-readers," he said.

Scallion is now turning The Rock'n'Roll Diaries into a series of four or five books.